VANITAS
: a journal of poetry, writings by artists, criticism, and essays. During its decade of intervention in the public realm, VANITAS came out quasi-annually, serving as a forum for international voices with an emphasis on coming to grips with current world situations. Each issue contained writings by artists whose primary modes were non-literary and featured the work of a visual artist. [www.vanitasmagazine.net]

Monday, April 27, 2009

You approach me carrying a bookThe instructions you read carry me back beyond birth To childhood and a courtyard bouncing a ballThe town is silent there is only one recreationIt’s throwing the ball against the wall and waitingTo see if it returnsOne dayThe wall reversesThe ball bounces the other way Across this barrier into the futureWhere it begets occupations namesThis is known as the human heart a muscleA woman adopts it it enters her chestShe falls from a trainThe woman rebounds 500 miles back to her childhood The heart falls from her clothing you retrieve itTurn it over in your hand the trademarkGives the name of a noted maker of balls

Elastic flexible yes but this is awfulYou sayHer body is limp not plastic Your heart is missing from itYou replace your heart in your breast and go on your way

12th day

Spring wind loosened her kimono from her legs. Nature no respecter of persons in the spring wind, has opened her shop. The spring wind blows through the balustrade.

15th day

A sound from far away. Days of mist and haze. May well feel bored and listless. Wouldn’t really know a glowworm from a lantern floating on top of a boat through the dark spring haze.

19th day

Today also, living in the haze — a large house under the redwoods, a lost man passing in the mists, many cars going by like boats. Faces without names, shrouded in a mist.

26th day

A long day. My eyes are weary. O, the days that are no more. So glad they’re over. The cat drifts in sleep beneath the sound of the spring wind in the redwoods. The raccoons rumble on the roof.

27th day

The morning expedition. Baby sparrow under the sink leaks little chirps. Mind in the way. Mr. Worm is coming.

30th day

When I felt the spring rain falling on my head through the hole in the roof I went out into the garden knelt down shed stupid tears at the foot of the century tree smelled things under the ground turning to mulch then went back inside and listened to the distant sound of ocean waves pounding against the shore in the spring rain.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

In the false-dawn twilighta rider enquired of a passer-by:Where is the house of my friend?The sky pausedThe passer-by held a branch of light which brushed the dark sand

He pointed to an aspen:before you reach that treeturn off at the garden paththat leads into a space more greenthan any god could dreamand go down that pathas far as the wings of honesty can reach

Continue beyond the end of the first part of your lifeand then turn againtake two stepstoward a flower that grows aloneat the foot of the fountainof the story of the earthstop and you will be swallowed upby fear transparent as water

In the closeness of the space that flowssomething rustlesin one of the surrounding pinesa child has climbed upto pluck a young birdfrom a nest made of lightand you call out to that child

Sunday, April 19, 2009

I know these radio wavesare being stored awayin my brain somewhereeven tho I’m not hereto pay any attentionto themThey’ll come back later asfrequency-modulatedvariety shows and UHF cabaretThis is what I was thinking, TedFor instance, while I waswriting thisthe following musiccame into my head:Overture to Sonata for Trumpets & Stringsby Henry PurcellMiles Davis: Ssh… PeacefulJimmy Reed: Hush, Hush

We went to BAM this afternoon to see "Nearly Ninety," the new piece by Merce Cunningham Dance Company (Merce in fact turned 90 on Thursday). It was phenomenal. Music by a conglomerate of Sonic Youth, John Paul Jones (of Led Zeppelin), and longtime MC collaborator Takehisa Kosugi, costumes by Romeo Gigli, and video by Franc Aleu. It is hard to comprehend how a 90-year-old can make a one-and-a-half hour piece that is so up-to-the-minute, in terms of visuals, sound and design, except that his modus operandi has always been one of choosing people to work with and then letting them create their parts, which come together only at the end. Usually, the dancers do not hear the music until the dress rehearsal. You could feel the excitement in the dancers' faces at times, used, as they have been, to dancing their pieces in silence, or rather to the accompaniment of footfalls and heavy breathing. In the first half, everything combined seamlessly — the music noisily crescendoing and decrescendoing, the watery images projected onto a scrim. Dancers moved in pairs or trios, often slowly, standing on one leg, the other extended, sometimes trembling at the knee, so difficult is it to hold those positions in the stress of a rapidly-changing performance. The dancers, particularly the women, were brilliant. One became so mesmerized by the spectacle — and the simplicity of the choreography — that the strength and control of the dancers was constantly re-emphasized. Sometimes, it was the head and upper body that remained in synch, while spinning; other times, it was a high, slow stretch, followed by a dive by the hands to floor (a gesture repeated several times by different combinations of dancers). The dancers who made the greatest impression on me were Julie Cunningham (a relation?), Jennifer Goggans, David Madoff, Marcie Munnerlyn, and Melissa Toogood. The projections did not work so well in the second half, as they became more literal (we could see close up what the musicians were doing at one point, at another details of dancers), and the progressive removal of scrims forced attention on an awkward neo-Constructivist structure supporting the musicians, whereas it had been more suggestive when we could only make out their vague outlines at the beginning. The piece ended, as all Merce's pieces do, in full flow. Everyone came to take a bow, and Merce himself was wheeled out in a wheelchair. During the standing ovation that followed, he gestured gently several times to the rafters. It could be taken as a recognition that this might be his last season on stage. More likely, like the basketball player who takes on cheerleading duties, he was telling the crowd to pump up the volume. We walked out into bright Brooklyn daylight dazzled.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Every day there are moments that do not seem to lead directly into the next moment. It must be those isolated moments, laid end to end, in which Zeno's arrow tries to cross the sky.

Since Zeno's arrow exists only inside his paradox, it can never land, and since, in those isolated moments, we too begin to take on the immateriality of a logical demonstration, there is no use in further discussion of that arrow.

A silence falls over the room.

All this is happening in a dream, or perhaps as if in a dream. This is not the loud logical silence of a glacier but the muffled baffling silence of a dream. In the dream there is a forest, and in the forest there are monkeys whose bodies give off light.

We'll never visit the forest.It makes more sense at the moment to think of a white monkey slowly fading back over a period of many long years into and gradually being absorbed by the surface--linen, paper, copper, wood--on which it is painted.

Or, perhaps, to think of the final note in a piece of music. The ripples of sound ebb away and finally there is no hint of reverberation left anywhere, silence fills the room.

This is not the cold silence of a paradox but the warm silence of a terrarium kept continually alive and in motion as in a dream without the isolation of sleep. As this silence takes hold of us it appears we're meant to experience life on a dying planet by becoming aware of other life. But this will not be easy.

If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.

Whether or not the white monkey also has such dreams we shall never know.

It's kind of amazing when you find out forty years later that the stuff you thought was totally great IS totally great. Like:

Don't let it bring you down

It's only castles burning

Just find someone who's turning

And you will come around

A whole host of people who really were able to sing poetry. We thought it was poetry, and lo and behold, it is, and not just any old poetry, but the kind you pull out in the dead of night, when the world looks very dark, when someone who shouldn't have died yet has died. So here, now, we offer two people who are turning. If you need it, they might help you come around. If not, they might turn your head, or heart. Haruki Murakami, from "Always on the side of the egg," a speech he made on receiving the Jerusalem Prize in literature:

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all humanbeings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragileeggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If wehave any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing inthe utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, livingsoul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploitus. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

There's more, and maybe we'll get to that, but from another part of the universe this came on a compilation CD a good friend sent. It was filled with great things (Perfect doing "30 Pieces") but somehow Oliver Mtukudzi's track really stood out, mesmerizing us even without being able to understand the lyrics.

2

Vincent.

You bring music, by Oliver Mtukudzi.

And words. Like these of Haruki Murakami, which I freely extract from your citation of his Jerusalem address,

We are all human beings fragile eggsfaced with a solid wallcalled The System

The wall is too hightoo strong and too cold

If we have any hope at allit will have to come from our believing inour ownand others' soulsand by the warmth created byjoining souls together

I think I hear you, or anyway am feeling in the dark (my own obscure dilation) for the musical line that leads me, in the Oliver Mtukudzi and Harumi Murakami messages of belief and hope, lights in the windows of our fleeting houses amid the cold night, to your voice in this. We may as well join our souls together as not.Don't let it bring you down

The belief and hope (speaking of fragile eggs as we were) impregnating the clichéd encouragement in that line doubtless do survive in pockets and corners of our souls, in this time; but, in my experience, only in a way much attenuated by time. Yet here we have the pleasure of that endeared memorial, Neil Young's whiny angel voice of innocence estranged by experience, now newly unfamiliar in that now you would remember that particular line, of all lines, in this most brought-down of all times.

The angelic innocence beyond irony yet changed by experience. A hopeful uncertainty, a whistling in the dark.

That whiny-voiced awkward angel in a lumberjack shirt. Strangeness, innocence and belief. Don't let it bring you down. But when I hear it in my mind, late on a cold night, amid the obscure dilation of my mental wanderings, the high voice of the whiny angel that begins to sing that line--once perhaps as innocent as I would have imagined the voice of this angel of Domenico Ghirlandaio--

it sounds troubled in a way that had not, formerly, occurred to me.

Now when I replay the song in my head I get stuck on the castles burning bit, and try to sort that out; the no one turning, the no one coming round; the coldness and darkness of the frozen North Woods in winter under the aching deep starlight above the hockey rink. The lights in the sky, the electromagnetic auras.

What happens after the castles burn down?I think of some very different angelic musicians, the Grunewald Concert of Angels, going on with their concert despite their tragic knowledge of--indeed, being in eternity, they have already seen it--the Inevitability of the Something Awful. They know what you and I know. They appear understandably brought down by knowing it. One would not dare say to them, Don't it let bring you down. Down is their kingdom of Up. They appear brought down rather completely. And yet they go on with the show.With their curious copper green skin and lizardlike digital appendages crawling over the strings to produce the astonishing chords of the unheard Angelic Concerto.

"...and there he was, ragged, splendid, wild, sticking out of the expectable heraldry of the national pastime like a gigantic puce-and-mauve sore thumb rampant on a field of snow-white jock straps..."In 1976 professional baseball invented a Man of the Year Award specifically for Mark Fidrych. In December of that year he flew from Massachusetts to L.A. for the ceremony, which was staged as part of the Major League Baseball annual winter meetings.

Before the ceremony, Mark was a bit nervous about the prospect of rubbing shoulders with Hollywood celebrities.

We were hanging out after, and I asked him what the show had been like.

He boarded one of his inimitable milk-run "trains of thought.""Man, I just had a whale of a time. I met Don Rickles, Frank Sinatra, Monte Hall, Cary Grant, Pat Henry...Y'know, when I first went there, I said this is gonna be--this is gonna stink. To me, y'know? Because I just felt that it wasn't what I thought it was--y'know, what I wanted it to be. But then, as it was, it turned out they really treated you well. Very well, y'know?

"But these guys--I'll clue ya, these actors, man, they were neat. I just never thought it'd be that much fun. I mean, are you kiddin' me? My mother woulda went nuts to meet Cary Grant. And Frank Sinatra! She'd have been goin' nuts! Because that's the age that she grew up in, y'know? And like to me, it was just neat meetin' em. But my mother, oh, that woulda--it woulda been her highlight, if ever. It was a highlight to me. Like Monte Hall was probably more of a highlight to me, because I've watched Monte Hall. You know what I mean? Where Frank Sinatra, his stuff I really didn't watch too much except for if he was in a bad-ass movie, y'know?..But Cary Grant, I used to see him a lot, y'know? But Monte Hall I'd have to say was really the guy that--cause they just cracked up laughin'. I said, Hey--this guy goes, Here, you wanna meet Monte Hall? I said, Whoa, no, don't tell me that!"

From No Big Deal: photo Clifton Boutelle

_________Sports Illustrated

October 10, 1977

In Which Today's Most Popular Bird Whistles Some Pretty Funny Tunes

Percy Bysshe Shelley certainly was a great poet, but he obviously knew from nothing about baseball:

Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert....

As baseball fans in Detroit and elsewhere can tell you, the line has got to read, "Bird thou always art...." for Mark (The Bird) Fidrych of the Tigers is one of the blithest spirits baseball has ever seen, heir to the tradition of heroic innocence established by such men as Rube Marquard and Germany Schaefer and carried on by the likes of Casey Stengel and Dizzy Dean. The tradition seemed to have run out of gas in this age of big-bucks baseball, but Fidrych has singlehandedly refueled it—and become, at the age of 23, a quasi-mythic figure in the process.

Myths and legends all seem to have their ghostwriters today, so it's no surprise that Fidrych has produced something called No Big Deal (Lippincott, $8.95), in collaboration with a writer named Tom Clark. But this being Fidrych, this book is different. Instead of an as-told-to autobiography it is done in question-and-answer form; and instead of your basic for-kids-only hagiography, it is pretty much warts-and-all—though The Bird, predictably, sports some amusing warts.

Clark says in his introduction, "Interviewing Mark is like being thrown into the water at an early age. You learn how to float in time, then you take a few strokes, then you're in the swim of it." He's right. Fidrych talks in waves and floods, splattering his sentences with apostrophes and italics and exclamation points. When he gets excited he's likely to shout, "Voom!" (he loves cars), and when he doesn't like the flow of the chatter he'll cry out, "Whoa!"

He is also a very, very funny talker and he loves to tell stories. My favorites revolve around the days when he played in the Appalachian League and lived in the Jim Dandy Trailer Camp, but others may fancy his encounter with Elton John ("He goes, I know a little bit about you. I said, Whoa. He's shock-in' the hell outa me.... I was lovin' it, though"), or the time Mickey Stanley visited his apartment and checked out all the groupies hanging around. ( Stanley said, "...you oughta make it a meat shop. Put numbers out there, it's so bad.")

Fidrych stories are like peanuts; once started, you can't stop. Since No Big Deal is full of them, it may well prove to be the funniest sports book of the year. Voom!

________

"Because, 'hey, that's what you call life.'"

________

New York TimesApril 13, 2009

Mark Fidrych, Baseball’s Beloved ‘Bird,’ Dies at 54

By Micheline Maynard

DETROIT — Mark Fidrych, the golden-haired, eccentric pitcher known as the Bird, who became a rookie phenomenon for the Detroit Tigers in 1976 and later saw his career cut short by injury, died Monday. He was 54.

Lou Requena

Mark Fidrych during his rookie season with the Detroit Tigers in 1976.

Rebecca Cook/Reuters

Mr. Fidrych, after his promising career was cut short by injuries, being introduced after the last game at Tiger Stadium in ’99.

His death occurred on his farm in Northborough, Mass., Joseph D. Early Jr., the district attorney for Worcester County, said in a statement.

A family friend discovered Fidrych’s body beneath a Mack dump truck, Early said. He appeared to have been working on the truck at the time. The Massachusetts State Police began an investigation into the accident, he said.

During the summer of the nation’s bicentennial, Fidrych (pronounced FID-rich), then 21, electrified the baseball world.

“He was the most charismatic player we had during my time with the Tigers,” said Ernie Harwell, the veteran announcer, who began broadcasting Tigers games in 1960. “I didn’t see anybody else who was as much of a character as he was."

Fidrych’s record in 1976 was 19-9, with an earned run average of 2.34, the best in major league baseball, and 97 strikeouts. His 24 complete games were the year’s best in the American League.

Fidrych was named the rookie of the year in the American League and finished second to Jim Palmer in the race for the Cy Young Award.

Called “the fidgety, 6-foot-3 bundle of nerves” by The New York Times, Fidrych had a mop of golden curls and a gawky gait that prompted a minor league manager, Jeff Hogan, to compare him to Big Bird, the “Sesame Street” character.

The nickname — shortened to the Bird — stuck, but his appearance was only one of Fidrych’s vivid traits.

He often talked to the baseball, fidgeted on the mound and got down on his knees to scratch at the dirt. Fidrych would swagger around the grass after every out and was finicky about baseballs, refusing to reuse one if an opposing player got a hit, and rejecting fresh ones he declared to have dents.

He liked to jump over the white infield lines on his way to the mound, with a wide, toothy grin that, coupled with his hair, made him easy to spot even from the upper reaches of Tiger Stadium.

“Everybody really had a fondness for this young guy, especially the young girls,” Harwell said. “After he got a haircut, they’d run into the barbershop to see if they could get the curls off the floor."

Mark Steven Fidrych was born Aug. 15, 1954, in Worcester, Mass. His wife, Ann, whom he married in 1986, and a daughter, Jessica, survive him.

The son of an assistant school principal, Fidrych attended public and private schools in Worcester and entered the 1974 amateur draft.

But Fidrych, a right-hander, was not picked until the 10th round, and he spent two seasons in the minor leagues before making the Tigers after spring training in 1976.

He threw a few innings as a relief pitcher and made his first start in May. He captured the attention of Tigers fans in his first game as a starter by throwing seven no-hit innings and allowing only two hits in a 2-1 victory against the Cleveland Indians.

A month later, Fidrych pitched the Tigers to a 5-1 victory over the Yankees in a nationally televised game in front of a capacity crowd at Tiger Stadium. Fans, who rocked the stadium with applause, refused to leave until Fidrych came out from the dugout to tip his cap.

Weeks later, he was named the starting pitcher in the 1976 All-Star Game. But he gave up two runs and took the loss as the National League won, 7-1.

Still, Fidrych’s reputation grew as the season progressed, drawing near-capacity crowds to stadiums across the country as he performed his antics and kept winning ballgames, falling one short of 20 victories.

The Tigers, who paid him the league minimum, $16,500, for the 1976 season, gave him a $25,000 bonus and signed him to a three-year contract worth $255,000.

Picking up a series of lucrative endorsements, including a deal with Aqua-Velva, an aftershave maker (he joked to The Detroit Free Press that “it was a lotion, not an aftershave, because I really wasn’t shaving yet”), Fidrych wrote an autobiography with the author Tom Clark called “No Big Deal.”

But as it turned out, his rookie season was his biggest.

Fidrych sustained two serious injuries as soon as the 1977 season began, tearing the cartilage in a knee while cavorting on the field in spring training, then suffering a rotator cuff injury during an early-season game.

“I was playing Baltimore in Baltimore, and about the fifth inning, something happened,” Fidrych wrote. “The arm just went dead."

The injury was not diagnosed until 1986, but by then Fidrych’s career was long finished. After 1976, he played in only 27 games through 1980. Released by the Tigers in 1981, Fidrych competed briefly with a minor league team owned by the Boston Red Sox.

His lifetime major league record was 29-19, with a lifetime E.R.A. of 3.10, in 58 games, all but two of them starts.

Fidrych went home to central Massachusetts, where he bought a dump truck, becoming a licensed commercial truck driver, and eventually his farm in Northborough, where his family owned a diner.

Fidrych returned to Tiger Stadium in 1999 for ceremonies marking the last game there. A cheer went up from the crowd when Fidrych pawed at the dirt on the mound.

This 1978 card and another team card from 1977 are the last possible traces in my incomplete collection of the all-time single season leader in joy. I believe the Bird is in the back row, second from right. I’ve talked about him before on this site, but I don’t feel as if I’ve approached the singular effect he had on my childhood. To me, he was everything good from the 1970s wrapped up into one inimitable package. He’s the Pet Rock, mood rings, Morganna the Kissing Bandit, CB radio, Sasquatch. He’s Saturday morning cartoons and spaghettios and good-natured fun-loving longhaired yahoos piling into a customized van to go to the Foghat concert. He’s the magic of Doug Henning and the bright-colored fantasies of HR Puffnstuff and the glossy neon of Dynamite magazine. He’s Alfred E. Neuman. He’s that moment when you’re a kid and you start laughing about something and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to stop. He’s the moment when you realize you’re no longer a kid. I never knew him but to smile at him on TV and in magazines and, of course, baseball cards, but when I heard he was found dead today, underneath a pickup truck he was apparently trying to fix, I couldn’t breathe. For a couple seconds I couldn’t fucking breathe.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

The sea repeats itself in dreams, a green-grey world of waterCreatures from the great star rebus haunt and runLeaving the emptiness of the day behind as kelp shroudsThoughts, memories, reflections, doubtsPale blank clouds like woolly fish in mist pink distance floating

Spooky cloud lights, layers of white shadowThe sea repeats itself in dreams from the great star rebus The beach stretches as far as the headland sand barClean detached waves wash over dry small stonesThe water is perfectly still, restructuring everything

Before the light radiates, where do you place it,back there or out here in the pre-worldof street riot and armed detachmentsgrown commonplace, where the beam rotates like a mars light,thought is as cautiously leashed as a bungee cable jumper

entrusted to a body beyond your body -- is therea body there, is it real, can you touch itthrough the dark fire of the pre-worldthat closes in? The presence of energy withinthe elastic net fate weaves is the reckless

daredevil of the pre-world; fate allows it threeleaps, two snaps back, causing suffering,causing hells; creating the body of desire,suspending it in the vastness of space,expanding it, disrupting it, offering it intense

Tom Clark blogs on Vanitas Site!!

For the foreseeable future, Tom Clark has agreed to blog on the Vanitas magazine site! This is amazing news, as Tom is not only prolific — but also highly entertaining, a genius, extremely knowledgeable, etc. Look for the "TC" tag in front of his post titles — and enjoy!

Vanitas 7 : The Self

For the seventh and final issue of VANITAS, we examine the idea of The Self. The work featured in issue 7 tests just how far the self can be stretched, partially as an exercise in self-expression, partially in search of what used to be called experience. Self, not so much in personae as in faces, in the sense the Mods used the term — referring to someone with style, perhaps within a culture of style, but an individual expression of that culture, or perhaps someone who can seemingly invent her own style, just standing there.

Available from Libellum !!!

Tom Clark: The New WorldTom Clark: TRANS/VERSIONSWe are excited to announce the publication of not just one but two books by Tom Clark — first and foremost his remarkable collection of new poems, The New World. In these poems, Clark trains his limpid style and eye on current street life in Berkeley, California. Clark's observational skill is informed by acute social critique and most significantly a heightened sense of time's rapid passage. There is personal history here, too, in poems to Philip Whalen and Robert Duncan. Youth is seen in retrospect, working up to present tense, ultimate doubts as it ends, or seems to. This book is accompanied by Clark's TRANS/VERSIONS, seven poems that are translations or homages to modern masters. Available through Small Press Distribution.

Recent Libellum Publications : Norma Cole and Basil King

Norma Cole : Natural LightNorma Cole’s book presents new poems by a modern master of the found and formulated — this book is divided into three sequences: “Pluto’s Disgrace,” “In Our Own Backyard,” and “Collective Memory.” Personal, global, universal: all three shift and interlock in repeating cadences. Their lock on reality provides consolation for these times.

Basil King : In The Field Where Daffodils GrowPart of King’s series “Learning to Draw” that brings to bear his talents both as writer and visual artist. This book contains the autobiography of a painting and contemplation of some heroes — Hartley, H.D., Williams, Demuth, Giotto, Nijinsky, Emily Carr, Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. "Paintings stay alive because people look at them. And when they don't, they die."